Saturday, March 24, 2012

A hint of changing conditions and a trip to White Horse Hill

As I was driving home last night, I was looking around on 28MHz SSB as I usually do. In addition to the 'usual' South Americans that I've been hearing for a few weeks there were a couple of fairly weak French stations. This interested me as I suspected I was hearing them via Es propagation. If that's true, then with any luck we will start to hear more Es on 28MHz and then hear it rising in frequency towards 50MHz and beyond.

This afternoon, in celebration of the gorgeous weather, Julie and I decided to go up White Horse Hill, which is about 10 miles to the south of where we live. Although it was a little misty up there, we had a great time walking, listening to the skylarks, watching the buzzards and picking out some of the local villages. I took my Icom E-92 handheld and had a tune around on 145 and 433MHz. I was particularly pleased to have a nice 145MHz simplex contact with Mike 2E0YYY/P who was on the Long Mynd in Shropshire. I suppose the distance between us was around 80-90 miles.